https://www.techpowerup.com/319416/intel-to-make-its-most-advanced-foundry-nodes-available-even-to-amd-nvidia-and-qualcomm Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, speaking at the Intel Foundry Services (IFS) Direct Connect event, confirmed to Tom's Hardware that he hopes to turn IFS into the West's premier foundry company, and a direct technological and volume rival to TSMC. He said that there is a clear line of distinction between Intel Products and Intel Foundry, and that later this year, IFS will be more legally distinct from Intel, becoming its own entity. The only way Gelsinger sees IFS being competitive to TSMC, is by making its most advanced semiconductor manufacturing nodes and 3D chip packaging innovations available to foundry customers other than itself (Intel Products), even if it means providing them to companies that directly compete with Intel products, such as AMD and Qualcomm.
Paul Alcorn of Tom's Hardware asked CEO Gelsinger "Intel will now offer its process nodes to some of its competitors, and there may be situations wherein your product teams are competing directly with competitors that are enabled by your crown jewels. How do you plan to navigate those types of situations and maybe soothe ruffled feathers on your product teams?" To this, Gelsinger responded "Well, if you go back to the picture I showed today, Paul, there are Intel products and Intel foundry, There's a clean line between those, and as I said on the last earnings call, we'll have a setup separate legal entity for Intel foundry this year, " Gelsinger responded."We'll start posting separate financials associated with that going forward. And the foundry team's objective is simple: Fill. The. Fabs. Deliver to the broadest set of customers on the planet."
He continues: "We hope that that includes Jensen (NVIDIA), Christiano (Qualcomm), and Sundar (Google), and you heard today it includes Satya (Microsoft), and I even hope that includes Lisa (AMD) going forward. I mean, we want to be the foundry for the world, and if we're going to be the Western foundry at scale, we can't be discriminating about who's participating in that. So, unequivocally, it is to be the foundry for the world. Commit supply chains, your leadership technology - the doors to the a la carte menu are wide open for the industry. So I want my foundry to be used by everybody. Period. We want to help build NVIDIA chips, and AMD chips, and TPU chips for Google, and inference chips for Amazon. Period. We want to help them and give them the most powerful, performant, and efficient technologies for them to build their systems," Gelsinger concluded.
Besides opening up the technological bleeding edge of IFS to third party customers; Intel's medium-term goal is to get into the semi-custom business. Imagine a Foveros-based semi-custom chip that has an Intel Compute tile with its IA cores; a SoC tile designed by Microsoft specific to its game console; and a Graphics tile with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics; or a Xeon semi-custom for AWS that has P-core tiles, as well as on-package DPU or network acceleration tiles, and custom security processor tiles. Gelsinger envisions Intel and IFS becoming a single-window for various IP mix-and-match semi-custom chips for customers.
Just another way for Intel to make money, even from its competitors.